Ghostly Landscapes

Either side of the train, flat black soil, landscape at its purest – land, and a scape unbroken until it met the sky. Regular ditches to drain the black peat, and now and then a blockhouse where a pump lifted the ditch water to the rod-straight rivers running to the huge North Sea sluices beyond the world’s curving. Nothing to see here but flatness merging into sky as the storm-winds that buffeted the train blew away the peat-soil, taking with it the relics of all its past seasons, blowing the carbon out ever since we dreamed of a new future for this place. On the train we sat together with our mobile phones and ignored that past, that present and that future. My seat companion watched a video on eyebrow tattooing. How many on that train hurtling towards the future by way of the Anthropocene (stopping at March, all change at Peterborough) knew those histories, or saw the landscape as more than just a surface out there beside the train? Black, flat, monotonous, hypnotic, choose your word and check your phone again. Four or five metres of black peat gone, oxidised, blown away and with it millennia of fenland landscape history.

We think we made this landscape and drained its past of meanings, when in one of the presents back down the line we dreamed of a new future, but that waterland past is barely held back by pumping out the drains by day and by night. And we are not the first to make this landscape. Below the surface are bog oaks in the peat, relics of a past built by plants and by animals. This was once a waterland of ducks and willows, beavers and alders, oaks and lynx, alder trees and white storks, frogs and grass snakes, eels and tench. Each year new reeds grew in the reed beds above the dead reeds of the year before, breaking down to form peat beds where snipe drummed and bitterns boomed, and rails made their skulking cries among the water plants. The black peat rose as the dead sedge settled on the lake beds, and eventually the bogs shouldered their black peat above the water. There were islands and great open meres too, and fens loud with cuckoos and warblers. This was a land where time circled from year to year as the warmth came and then the winter and the great flocks of wildfowl darkened the sky, and the waters were clouded every spring with the almost transparent elvers  in unimaginable numbers, as all the other springtime youngsters fed on them, their growth driven by the power of ocean nutrients the elvers brought in their bodies to fertilise the fens and live again as the atoms of the bodies of the birds and of the trees. This landscape is now haunted by that past, a past of circulating seasons and change so gradual as to hold no dream of future, and no creature inclined to dream of it.

Another past had people in it who had found a landscape and a living space full of the plants and animals that had built it out of the air and the sunshine and the waters of the earth, and they settled among them. They caught fish and beavers and ducks and lived their lives among the creatures in lake villages and on islands, and thought maybe more of the past than of the present, as they found ways to honour or remember those that came before them. Set apart from most of the other animals sufficiently to mourn their dead, but not too much apart, trying to find comfort in the world but not changing it more than the beavers did, building their dams. They were still there, speaking the language of the ancient Britons, when Saint Guthlac came here to live the contemplative life fourteen hundred years ago, bringing with him new ideas of living which the fen people defied until the fens were drained from beneath their reputedly webbed feet. This vast place where water and land once interlaced with the creatures and the plants to form one of the richest places on the earth was finally slaughtered by the men of the future, the drainers, the dreamers, the money men, as surely as if they had cut its throat and drained away its life blood. From Lincoln to Cambridge the great waterland was now black monocultures; the biodiversity drained away and the peat drying and shrinking and being blown away, right here outside the windows of the train, passing the very place where we rid ourselves of the last huge Mere of Whittlesey, using a giant steam pumping engine bought at the Great Exhibition by a Mr Wells of Holne. His dream world of progress is now a world haunted by the ghosts of the past and of the complex ecologies ruined, and the ghosts of other futures. And the quivering ghosts of the wagon-loads of fish dying in the mud as the waters left them.

Such ghosts are everywhere in our landscapes. Bluebells may still flower where the oakwood has fallen to the woodman and the landowner. Bracken in the uplands may show you ghost woodlands where the monks’ sheep nipped off every tree that germinated until the last oak stood stagheaded and the bracken was unchecked by shade. You may never have heard the wolves calling to each other but you may be haunted by the lost calls of curlew and lapwings, or now even of the song thrush and the cuckoo, or by the corncrake calling among the rushy meadows when you were a child in Donegal. Many of these miraculous organisms are little more than memories for some of us, forgotten by most of the riders on that train, but the works of man are often still around for us to look upon (ye mighty and despair). That Donegal child saw the potato ridges running up the hillsides memorialising the millions who died or emigrated when potato blight struck and famine followed, and in much of the English midlands the ridges and furrows of the ancient open field system are visible when the sun is low, spectral shadows of the landscapes of whole parishes, with their trackways out to the open field and to the commons, the wastes, the hay meadows and the watermills. Above these skeletons of past communities are the straggly hedges and barbed wire of the enclosers, which are the ghosts of a movement that turned landscape shared since prehistory into parcels of land for men to buy and sell.  Everywhere are the ghosts of past landscapes of riches, drained in one way or another, lost to communities, claimed by individuals In the west of Ireland only the name of the village of Quilty remains of the great wood (Coillte) that was pocketed by an Elizabethan who monetized land granted to him by a queen who never owned it, by selling off the timber. In the Highlands a few remnant pines on the hillsides above Loch Maree remind us of a great forest cut down to make ammunition boxes, and once you know what has been drained away the beauty will never be quite the same and the ghosts of those killed by the ammunition will lurk round those ancient pines among the mists.

And through all this run the metaphors of the train and of the draining. The train because it symbolises linear dreams of progress, the draining because all these landscapes have been drained of their richnesses by men – always men – dreaming of change that they called progress, that ran on straight lean shining rails to a future where they grew ever richer and the world ever poorer. Where the circular time of nature is replaced by the straight lines and linear times of the Romans and the railways and what we call progress, which word they bind to everything they do to justify whatever they have done, to tell us they have changed the world and we can’t change it back.

Some of our inventions save the lives of babies. Some make it easier to sit here in my kitchen and research the biology of eels. You can order up a toilet roll holder from China with a steel shelf for your phone so that you can have it to hand while you are at stool, and it (the phone-shelf, not the stool) will arrive next day. All these changes share the railway line, going one way, towards progress, a treacherous destination way beyond March and Peterborough, or Cambridge’s new dream, a silicon valley among the fenlands.  We forget that time is circular too, and things revolve and maybe come around again. Not everything we do is progress, and we need to be attentive to the ghosts so that we can remember what they have done to us and to the world we live in. Some change is good and some is bad, and we need to be wary of calling it all progress because that makes us believe it is irrevocable. We need to ignore the messages asking us to forget, put out by a few private owners and public officials with their eyes focused on short-term gains to pretend that environmental devastation does not exist. The fens will spring to life if we let the water back. In Scotland there are pipers playing at military memorials, but The Flowers of the Forest is a lament for dead soldiers, not for lost forests. People are quietly rewilding those forests, and their reversing of environmental history is progress too, if we insist on using that treacherous word. And if we remember that the land was once communal, and the village children free to roam it all, we may better defy the hedge fund manager trying to stop us camping on Dartmoor, or the farmer who has emerged from our history of progress to own the farm that has the shed that houses the chickens that eat the soya that comes from the lost wildernesses of Brazil…. You can see where I’m going here, failing to get in somewhere the house that Jack built ( or was it Jerry?) before the rain washes all that chicken shit into the River Wye.